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Mozilla’s now director of public policy once asked me, with a straight face, why I was giving them a hard time and holding Mozilla to a higher standard: “we’re just another Silicon Valley tech company.”
But that’s not what you tell people publicly, is it, Mozilla?
Still, it’s time y’all got this.
Mozilla is a half-billion-dollar for-profit corporation – whose CEO makes >$3M/yr – that has a foundation do its PR.
https://www.howtogeek.com/760425/firefox-now-sends-your-address-bar-keystrokes-to-mozilla/
Mozilla isn’t an ally. Mozilla is Big Tech. Mozilla is Big Web.
A greedy one.
@aral
@aral Yes, Mozilla's CEO is also not a great role model and not every decision for e.g. Firefox was perfect. It might be Big Tech and not I can see why you wouldn't call them ally. But to me Mozilla (or their products) seem not as bad as GAFAM (or their products). I'm reluctant to call Mozilla an enemy among the ranks of evilness as other Big Tech.
Do you think some differentiated judgement does make sense or really they don't deserve getting cut any slack?
@floppy If anything they’re worse: they have everyone believing they’re a not-for-profit fighting for human rights etc., when that’s just PR and they’re just another Silicon Valley Big Tech company.
@louisrcouture @floppy Read the thread, my other posts here, (or the Mozilla section in https://ar.al/2019/01/11/i-was-wrong-about-google-and-facebook-theres-nothing-wrong-with-them-so-say-we-all/) and do your own research into Mozilla Corporation.
@aral @louisrcouture @floppy
Just to add to the research, note that Mozilla has ignored these bug reports, which would be trivially easy to resolve if they were on the side of humanity:
@georgelund
I guess you haven't heard of that time in 2020 when Mozilla laid off 25% of its employees, but still raised the pay of upper management that was already in the millions?
Also, how do you justify the fact that it's not possible to directly donate to the development of the Firefox browser, but only to Mozilla?
@vanderZwan @aral @floppy do I think there might be cases where an organisation needs to be smaller, but executive pay must rise to be competitive? Yes actually, but I haven't read the foundation's minutes so no, I don't know if it was justified in that case. And Firefox is huge and certainly historically has had Google cash. It makes sense for them to use donations in any way that best fulfils their non-profit objectives.
@georgelund @vanderZwan @floppy Where “historically” means currently, to the tune of half a billion dollars a year.
@aral Mozilla is the best we have right now, even if it's not perfect. All the hate it gets does not create better products, it just pushes people to Chrome and it's clones.
@andreipetcu It’s definitely not the “best we have right now.” That’s probably GNOME Web in terms of ethics. Sadly, it’s the “best we have under the Silicon Valley model.”
And there, again, folks should use it without being used by it by using Librewolf instead.
What we need is a to fund an organisation from public funds, to create a browser for the public good.
I know, how communist of me ;)
@aral @andreipetcu what about servo?
@aral This is a complicated issue , because mozilla efforts for foss are evident, but it should be realised that privacy cannot be copromise even if the company is unable to make profit without going big tech way , so they needs to overcome this problem. Still we should not forget the tor browser the best browser for privacy and security